Nokia E75 smartphone

Wired rating

Wired

Hmmm.

Tired

Keyboard fails to deliver. General lack of excitement

Price

Varies with contract and operator

Touchscreens are far from perfect, and it was with something approaching relief that I whipped the SIM card out of my touch-phone and slotted it into the touch-free Nokia E75. No more fat-fingered frustration at missed keystrokes and fumbled menu selections. No more struggling to line up the cursor with the typos that inevitably creep into touch-typed emails.

Sadly, my positive feelings about the E75, a business-orientated smartphone with a slide-out qwerty keyboard, did not last long. The idea of a physical keyboard might have been appealing, but what I had in mind was a better keyboard than this. Nokia has opted to make the keys as big as possible, which sounds sensible but actually isn't. The Blackberry Curve, the ugly-but-practical keyboard class leader, proves that what makes for a good keyboard is big gaps between keys, not big keys.

Big keys means small gaps and that in turn means you end up pressing more keys than you want to. Nokia has tried to circumvent the problem by making the keys really hard to press. That isn't much help. True, it's harder to press the keys you don't want to press, but it's also hard to press the ones you do. Pressing hard slows you down, and since there's no gap between the keys, you still end up pressing the wrong ones. The shape of the keyboard feels wrong too: holding the long, thin device in both hands leaves your thumbs at an odd angle for typing, especially for typing hard.

Everything else about the phone is fine. It looks reasonably good, it makes reasonable use of its small screen, the interface is reasonably reasonable. It's just not all that inspiring. The one reason you might have bought this smartphone rather than another is that it has a physical keyboard, but that, as I might have mentioned, doesn't work properly.

Specifications

Connectivity

GPRS, WCDMA, Edge, HSDPA, wi-fi, Bluetooth

Operating system

Symbian

Battery

5hrs talk time, 11 days standby

Camera

3.2MP photos, 640x480 video

Screen

2.4-inch, 320x240 pixels

Memory

4GB microSD card included

Size

112 x 50 x 14

Weight

139g

Extras

Full qwerty keyboard

Edited by Katie Scott

Comments

When will Nokia truly make an effort for those of us using Mac to work, rest and play?! It's surely gotta be worth it given the increasing penetration of the OS after the horrors recently unleashed by MS. At the least Wired, please flag up the Nokia aint into Mac so your going to be having stupid interoperability issues if you're a Mac and a Nokia which for this buyer, makes them next to useless as I aint a geek - I just want an easy life.